Flash, I thought of your (and my) experiences looking at the reporting.

I would not spend more than a minute on a hagiography of J

Mr. Jobs was a great marketer, also perhaps the most interesting (or at least, one of the less unethical) profitable products of the weird post/late hippy success-cult movements, sure I liked the Mac (but really they had a pretty good period *before* his recall to the company in the late '90s, did a bit of time as an admin on a Mac network in the very early '90s). The myth that they were all bad machines is just that, a myth, the failure came a little later. They were a hell of a lot better than what Jobs had been pushing before his ouster, much more expandable, and even got a monopoly on yet another field (past the lawyers and lame 'designers' who were their mainstay at the time) through ProTools being Mac only, and for a good few years, better than anything on Wintel systems.

Original Mac was impossible with no hard drive--I once did the layout for a magazine article I'd written with Pagemaker running from floppies, should have counted the number of disc swaps (insane), how is that useability, of course it was soon after the Lisa launch (went to the local launch event, very impressed, but impossibly dear for what it could do).

... so Steve's basic idea was pricey systems (NextStep too, a great system but Jobs didn't design it, the great thing he did on Next was mixing in new ideas (generally not his) from the world of academia and research, mainly from Unix, never played with one but read anything I could find about the system except blatant PR. Jobs invented nothing on the Next and nothing in general, just put his name on patent applications through le droit de seigneur) as CEO etc.

The Jobsian failure on the original Mac was insisting on a serial port only, there are two ways of looking at that. 1: A genius who predicted what might happen (but is still unstable and inefficient in a lot of areas, so we now have so-called 'multi-wire serial', which is actually, err, parallel, because it requires multiple signal lines).

2: Someone obsessed with manufacturing costs and prone to forcing his customers into immature solutions just because they cut down on those costs

Most of all, I think of the money he got for whatever he did on Atari Breakout, and how he never passed a cent of that to Wozniak.

I remember my first LCii... loved it (Arashi was played more than it being a fuctional computer though).

There are a whole host of luminaries that have fallen and not really been mentioned, and in a lot of respects, SJ did not deserve the echelon he was 'imagined' to. but...

He was also a wonderful inovator even with failures, the original Apple and the 2e were wonders, and the guidence he imbued his company with is something we could all learn from. In the list of techno-geeks, he certainly warrants remberence.

So LOLOLOLOLOL at the cynicism of the whole thing, the video of the 81-minute super-secret service (but only in the Apple religion) being officially popped onto Youtube, the book release, the publicity from unreliable anecdotes in the book (most seem to be, except the quotes from interviews, a lot of those are really dickheadish on Saint Steve's part) talk about multi-faceted marketing!

John McCarthy, creator of LISP and pioneer of artificial intelligence, passed away at 84, not well, and without much company.

Some commentators have had the gall to say that his approach (as expressed in LISP) was misguided. This is because they are ignorant and only interested by science-fictional AI, personally I'd rather not see much of that.

Applications of LISP, particularly in games re. this forum, say otherwise.

I agree with you about cancer Headkaze, look at how very wealthy people like Kerry Packer are now able to get extensions on heart trouble, strokes, too. Not that the very wealthy also don't have access to expensive scanners that greatly reduce the risks from many forms of cancer as well as the others in the big three.

Really doubt that Jobs had much to do with the quality of development platforms, other than insisting it be there and getting feedback on it. In my spell as a Mac admin. (a few years after Jobs got the toss from Apple) we had all of the manuals in the office, very nice environment. Never did more with a Newton than play with them at shops, but I take the word of the fans that it was also an interesting system.

Don't like celeb. culture much in general, the press feeding on the Internet for all of that crap really lives up to Something Awful's slogan ('the Internet makes you stupid'). E.g. who the f... is Kim K.a.rd.a.s.h.i.a.n and why the f... should we give a damn? Overload of publicity for the death of St. Steve falls squarely into the same category, not that his life does. Just saying that I'd care more about anybody here, for one.

Don't forget the book was authorised, really doubt the timing wasn't, too, and publication was brought forward only to maximise publicity, probably also part of the deal.

Likewise the 'services', both at Apple and the main one for the big players. Apple posting their 'supersecret' sales motivator one on Youtube just a few days later is the height of bad taste, but again, probably worked out by Mr. Aggro Controller in advance.